Oct 29, 2013

So I've decided to take my industrious artistic entrepreneurial spirit to the next level and am currently filling out an application for admissions into an online college and go for a bachelors degree in Business...

It's funny these essay questions.. I'm currently stumped on what should reasonably be one of the easiest ones:

Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you and describe that influence.

The last time I was seeking admissions into school this would have been easy and obvious. I would have chosen one of my two favorite teachers from high school, Mr. Cook who was my drama instructor and insisted that I was good enough to pursue a career in theatre, or crap.. um, Ms. Thisdale I think who was the faculty adviser for Amnesty International which I was secretary/treasurer of as well as the environmental club which I was president of. After college instead of starting to teach right away she took 5 years off and did the Greenpeace type thing spending the majority of that time working in a Tibetan refugee camp. She told social studies and she just brought about a worldly knowledge of the subject as well as instilled a sense of civil unrest in me making me aware of conditions beyond the posh 3rd world conditions where I grew up and the importance of having compassion for all of Earth's inhabitants. She died from thyroid or brain cancer a few years after I graduated and I regret that I never went back and visited her and told what a good job she'd done as a teacher in my case and how much she profoundly shaped my whole entry and attitude in early adulthood. Hmm.. maybe I will doing it on her. This is sounding good and it's certainly over 70 words.. but likely over 100 which sucks, I hate cutting my expressions short. It's stifling.. reminds me of that artist's statement I had to write for an art grant that was perfect until I went through and trimmed out as many pronouns, long words, and prepositional phrases as I possibly could to make it fit within the character limits and suddenly it read like utter cracked out gibbering nonsense.

So I had thought that perhaps being 20 years out of high school those influences weren't really relevant anymore. I have most certainly had several major and more significant influences since then but here's the conundrum.. which one? My friend Freedom was huge! But what do I say.. he was this beautiful amazing hippie musician who's music brought about a deep a personal spiritual connection to my holy guardian angel and/or native american spirit animal and made me remember past lives where we once lived together as a tribe in harmony with nature? I don't like talking about my hippie days. It was thoroughly heart breaking how young dumb and naive we were thinking we would change the world! I ended up becoming a drug addicted goth pagan seeking out initiation or rather just recognition in a certain secret magickal order that's only purpose it served was teaching me an unexpectedly hard lesson again in having high hopes of spiritual attainment and accomplishment within a brotherhood. Apparently even if you swear an oath of loyalty for life you might not get the same in return. Yet again my most sincerest ambitions of being disciplined and doing good things for myself and the world resulted in me finding myself in the middle of a big mass of drama I had no influence or control over whatsoever but was pulled into by default after which I was utterly abandoned by those I so devotionally put my utmost trust in. I'm still completely dumbfounded, angry, and hurt. But that was a significant influence on my life for better or baffling.

What next? Well jeez, that actually furthered a whole slew of repetitive patterning where I committed myself fully to a project or group and was eventually removed and continue to this day to watch others reap the benefit of my blood, sweat, and tears. The most significant person who influenced my life in the past 5 years was the love of my life who utterly gut wrenchingly broke my heart and refuses to even acknowledge or credit me for any of the massive success he's had as a result of my most passionate dedication to seeing to the accomplishment of his dream. See.. none of this deeply personal trauma/drama is appropriate for such a vague generic question on a college application. I guess I should just do a standard mom or dad response or Gandhi. Well typing this has helped me put my life into perspective for sure! I hate how with all the boundless blessing I've received in my life, I think and feel like I'm a victim. It goes back to that one World History teacher in high school who taught me that no matter how hard I could ever perceive my life to be there are millions who have it way incredibly worse! Yep, her.. now to make sure I got her name right. Theresa Thisdale or Thomas maybe Thompson. I have one single friend from there on Facebook who I can ask.. she's actually the one who told me she died.